crypto blog
No rescue for Terra: Swiss asset manager denies $3B LUNA/UST bail-out talks
GAM Investments has quashed fake news reports that surfaced on Friday that claimed the Swiss asset manager would invest some $3 billion to aid in the recovery of the Terra ecosystem, including LUNA and TrueUSD (UST) stablecoin. An announcement published on May 12 claimed that the firm was engaging in talks with Terraform Labs to assist in recovery attempts after Terra’s algorithmic stablecoin UST lost its $1 peg — causing a cataclysmic crash of the acclaimed blockchain protocol which had become a darling of the Decentralized Finance space. Cointelegraph has confirmed with GAM Investments that the press release was fabricated — with head of communications and investor relations Charles Naylor categorically labeling the release as fake news – which even included fake quotes from ...
Chairman of the Digital Euro Association: ‘The primary aim of the digital euro is still not clear’
The European Central Bank (ECB) is planning to launch a prototype of the digital euro in 2023. In the next five years, Europe could have its own central bank digital currency (CBDC) up and running. However, there are still many questions surrounding the prospective digital currency. In what form could it be issued? Is the ECB too late to the CBDC party, especially compared to other central banks such as that of the People’s Republic of China? To address these and other questions, Cointelegraph auf Deutsch spoke with Jonas Gross, chairman of the Digital Euro Association (DEA) and member of the expert panel of the European Blockchain Observatory and Forum. New digital cash Gross said that compared to digital cash issued by a commercial bank, central bank money carries fewer risks. A commerci...
Bitcoin mining in Norway gets the green light as the proposed ban rejected
There’s Nor-way they can ban Bitcoin (BTC) mining in Norway now. That’s according to a majority vote passed by the Norwegian parliament on May 10. The proposal to ban Bitcoin mining in Norway was first suggested in March this year by the Red Party (Norway’s communist party.) In this week’s vote, the proposal was overturned as only Norway’s left-leaning parties, including the Socialist Left Party, the Red Party and the Green Party would support a ban on cryptocurrency mining. Jaran Mellerud, an Analyst at Arcane Research and a Cointelegraph confidant shed light on the developments: “The vote these parties lost was against banning large-scale Bitcoin mining overall.” “Having lost this vote, these political parties will likely make one more attempt at increasing the power tax specifical...
Canadian Bitcoin ETF adds 6.9K BTC in one day as GBTC discount hits record low
Bitcoin (BTC) descending to $24,000 has cost its largest institutional investment vehicle more than the average hodler. According to data from on-chain monitoring resource Coinglass on May 13, the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) is now trading at a nearly 31% discount. Grayscale CEO: Investors are “waiting for things to settle down” Amid ongoing market volatility this week, GBTC has seen its fledgling recovery fall flat on its face — for the time being. The so-called GBTC premium, long in negative territory and thus a discount in practice, has now reached its lowest ever. As of May 13, the discount was 30.6%, meaning that shares in GBTC traded at almost one third below the Bitcoin spot price (referred to as net asset value, or NAV). The figures mark a distinct turnaround for the...
Cryptotrader Jeremy Spence gets 42 months in prison for deception
A 25-year-old crypto trader from Rhode Island, Jeremy Spence, also known as “Coin Signals” on social media channels, was sentenced to 42 months in prison. He was charged with defrauding 170 people for more than $5.37 million. Fake investment funds The Department of Justice (DoJ) issued a press release saying that Spence had been operating several crypto investment funds between November 2017 and April 2019. These include the Coin Signals Bitmex Fund, the Coin Signals Alternative Fund and the Coin Signals Alternative Coin Signals Long Term Fund. Investors interested in the fund would transfer cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum to Spence who in turn made false promises of high returns. Judge Lewis Kaplan of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York sai...
Robinhood shares spike 30% after Sam Bankman-Fried buys $650M stake
Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire founder and CEO of cryptocurrency exchange FTX has acquired a substantial 7.6% stake in the popular online brokerage, Robinhood. The news was well received by the market, with Robinhood’s (HOOD) stock price initially soaring over 30% in after hours trading. At the time of writing the price has settled to a 24% overall gain. According to a securities filing made with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, Bankman-Fried purchased a total of $648 million in Robinhood shares at an average price of $11.52. The purchases disclosed by Bankman-Fried reportedly began in mid-March and continued through until Wednesday. In the securities filing, Bankman-Fried made it clear that he had, “no intention of taking any action toward changing or influenc...
TZ APAC’s Colin Miles: Blockchain will be taught in classrooms in 3-5 years
Colin Miles, the newly-appointed CEO of TZ APAC expects blockchain and web 3.0 curricula to start becoming an integral part of secondary and tertiary education within the next three to five years. “I would think it’s that classic medium-term, three-to-five timeline,” said Miles. Miles was speaking to Cointelegraph after the announcement of TZ APAC’s partnership deal with the National University of Singapore (NUS)’s School of Computing on May 10, which will see the Tezos agency supporting the development of the university’s new center for Nurturing Computing Excellence. Miles said: “If you have a dedicated center in NUS, which runs blockchain courses every day of every week for students… it will become part of the fabric of one of the best computing schools in the world. I would...
Vitalik donates $4M to Uni of NSW for pandemic detection tool
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has donated $4 million worth of USD Coin (USDC) to the University of New South Wales (UNSW) to support the development of a pandemic detection tool. The capital, which equates to roughly $5.3 million Aussie dollars, is part of Buterin’s self-described “moonshot anti-COVID effort” dubbed Balvi Filantropic Fund in partnership with the Shiba Inu memecoin project (SHIB) and Crypto Relief. The funds will further support the development of the OISNT-based EPIWATCH tool which utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and open-source data to create early pandemic warning signs. Created by Kirby Institute Professor and Biosecurity Research head Raina MacIntyre the tool scans millions of items of publicly available online data, including social media and news reports ...
SEC’s Hester Peirce says new stablecoin regs need to allow room for failure
Commissioner Hester Peirce — also known as the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SECs) “crypto mom” — has backed a regulatory framework for stablecoins that allows “room for there to be failure.” Speaking at an online panel on May 12 hosted by financial think-tank the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) Peirce, who has long been an advocate for crypto, was asked to shed light on the actions being taken by U.S. regulatory bodies in regard to cryptocurrency. “One place we might see some movement is around stablecoins,” Peirce answered, “that’s an area that has gotten a lot of attention this week.” “It’s been one area within crypto that’s really had quite a moment and there’s a lot of stablecoin use and therefore people are thinki...
Crypto-associated stocks hammered as COIN and HOOD drop to record lows
Bad news continues to dominate crypto media headlines and May 12’s juiciest tidbit was the unexpected collapse of the Terra ecosystem. In addition to the weakness seen in equities, listed companies with exposure to blockchain startups and cryptocurrency mining have also declined sharply. Bitcoin mining stocks continue bleeding… Mining investors probably wish they had simply bought bitcoin instead at the beginning of 2022, as most bitcoin mining stocks have underperformed bitcoin by a wide margin. pic.twitter.com/anSoUEoUJ1 — Jaran Mellerud (@JMellerud) May 11, 2022 While it may be easy to blame the current pullback solely on Terra’s implosion, the truth is that the price of Bitcoin mining stocks has largely mirrored the performance of BTC since reaching a peak in November...
US Senate confirms Jerome Powell for another four years as Fed chair
The United States Senate has confirmed the nomination of Jerome Powell as the chair of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System until 2026. In an 80–19 landslide vote on the Senate floor on Thursday, U.S. lawmakers confirmed Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve, a position he held from February 2018 until February 2022, when he was named chair pro tempore until a confirmation vote could be secured. Powell was one of four Fed nominees awaiting a full Senate vote following weeks of delays due, in part, to partisan obstructionism — Republican lawmakers in the Senate Banking Committee boycotted a meeting in February that would have likely sent Powell’s nomination to the Senate for a vote earlier. However, some of United States President Joe Biden’s nominations for the Fed have re...
Look out below! Ethereum derivatives data hints at further downside from ETH
Ether (ETH) is down 38% in three weeks and the current $2,000 level is 59% below the $4,870 all-time high that was reached in November 2021. Additional newsflow that added to the current market wide volatility were the bankruptcy fears that emerged after Coinbase, the largest U.S. exchange reported a $430 million first-quarter 2022 loss. In the most recent 10-Q filing Coinbase included the following disclosure: “In the event of a bankruptcy, the crypto assets we hold on behalf of our customers may be subject to bankruptcy proceedings.” Regulatory uncertainty was also partially responsible for Ether’s sharp correction. On May 11, Kukmin, a South Korea-based newspaper, reported a leaked draft of the upcoming governmental “Digital Asset Basic Act (DABA)” bill. Th...
